The Violent Universe (1969) Carl Sagan Robert MacNeil

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• published: 10 Dec 2015
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Carl Sagan, 12 years before COSMOS and just prior to the first moon landing in 1969. The Violent Universe 0:00:52 Part 1 (skips intro music which many find disagreeable 0:04:28 Part 1( introduction of Carl Sagan ) 0:28:47 Part 2 0:58:57 Part 3 1:28:46 Part 4 1:59:44 Part 5 June 1, 1969 KCET USA/CA Richard Burton reads poems celebrating the wonders of the cosmos in "The Violent Universe .” Discoveries that are revolutionizing astronomy and changing men’s notions of the cosmos are examined in a repeat broadcast of “The Violent Universe,” a two-and-a-half hour color program presented by Public Broadcast Laboratory, Thursday at 9:30 PM on KCET, channel 28. Pulsars, quasars, infra-red galaxies, red giants, white dwarfs, neutrinos, cosmic rays, redshift, and all the major recent discoveries in astronomy are seen in the broadcast, which also features the first motion picture of a quasar (a very distant galaxy). The broadcast ranges from observatories in Europe to observatories in Australia, and from an observatory orbiting in space to one sunk a mile underground at the bottom of a gold mine in the South Dakota Badlands. Some 30 distinguished astronomers are seen at work in their observatories. Among them are Sir Bernard Lovell at Jodrell Bank, England; Thomas Gold at the giant Arecibo radiotelescope, high in the hills of Puerto Rico; Bernard Mills hunting pulsars at Mount Stromlo in Australia; Jan Cort at Dwingeloo in Holland; Maarten Schmidt at Palomar; Sir Martin Ryle at Cambridge, England; Tom Kinman at Lick, California; Frank Low in his Lear Jet “observatory” flying his telescope above cloud cover; and Donald Kniffen sending up a gamma-ray tracking chamber in a balloon. The birth and death of stars, the possibilities of hitherto unknown sources of energy out in the stars, and quasars that act in ways nothing known in physics can explain, are examined by Robert Dicke of Princeton, Jesse Greenstein of Palomar and Mount Wilson, Allan Sandage and Bernard Pagel of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, physicist Philip Morrison of M.I.T., and Richard Henry’, rocket researcher at the United States Naval Research Laboratory. Did the universe begin in a week’s time, with one explosion, as proponents of the “Big Bang” theory argue, or is it continually expanding in a relatively orderly way through all time, as defenders of the “Steady State” theory maintain? The controversy, which has implications for theology as well as for the movement of man out into space, is described in the broadcast. The broadcast goes to Japan to visit the home of Tsutomu Seki, the amateur astronomer who teaches classical guitar for a livelihood and who in 1965, with Kaoru Keya, discovered the Ikeya- Seki comet. Featured in the broadcast is a studio reconstruction of a section of the universe, with 100 stars hung in their proper perspective in space. The astronomical proportions involved in the scale replica are so vast that one foot of studio floor equals three light years—or 18,000,000,000,000 (18 trillion) —miles. The script of “The Violent Universe” was written by Nigel Calder. Narrator is Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy at Cornell, with Robert MacNeil, PBL special correspondent in London who is also a reporter for the BBC. This 5-part series from archive.org has been concatenated for your viewing pleasure.